IIT-K professors have said the Gita Supersite, which used to register 500 hits a day, showed a sudden spike in traffic with 24,000 hits

IIT-K’s Gita Supersite project was aimed at converting ancient Indian knowledge in a contemporary format accessible on the Internet.(Istock)

Kanpur A hitherto dormant website of IIT-Kanpur (IIT-K) on ancient texts, including the Vedas and Shastras, has shown a sudden spike in traffic which could have been triggered off by a WhatsApp message, the Indian Express has reported.

Gita Supersite, designed by IIT-K faculty and the government-funded Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions has texts in Sanskrit. The institute’s professors have said the site, which used to register 500 hits a day showed a sudden spike in traffic with 24,000 hits, the newspaper said.

Quoting Professor T V Prabhakar of the computer science and engineering department, the Indian Express said the Gita Supersite project was aimed at converting ancient Indian knowledge in a contemporary format accessible on the Internet. Prabhakar spearheaded the designing of the database and translations of texts like The Gita and the Upanishads in the institute a decade ago

The “sudden surge” in online traffic was noticed in October last year and the reason was attributed to a WhatsApp message circulated on social media.

The message, which was accessed by The Indian Express this week, reads that “IIT-Kanpur has developed a website on our treasures of Vedas, Shastras etc. Finally someone from today’s science and technology field is digging into what has already been done many many years ago…Please share this as much as you can.”

The traffic at the site went up to 24,000 hits a day, registering an increase of 4,700% in readership from India and around the world. Now about 12,000 hits a day are recorded.

“This is the power of social media. This is all we can put a finger on behind this surge,” Prabhakar was quoted as saying by Prabhakar.